The Intel® IA-64, or IPF, processor architecture provides a relatively spectacular increase in machine resources and hardware features for supporting modem operating-system and software program development. The IA-64 architecture provides, for example, a register stack engine functionality that automatically stores the contents of registers to backing-store memory and reloads the contents of registers from backing-store memory upon routine calls and termination of called routines, respectively. The RSE manages a circular buffer of general purpose registers on which register stack frames are allocated for called routines and de-allocated when the called routines complete execution and return control to a calling routine. The IA-64 architecture provides architectural support for interrupt handlers to optionally allocate new register stack frames when register resources greater than the non-stacked and banked registers available to interrupt handlers are needed. To facilitate register-stack management by interrupt handlers and other privileged code, the IA-64 architecture provides a cover instruction, which has the effect of allocating a new, empty register stack frame, and relegating registers of most recently allocated stack frames to dirty-register status, allowing the register stack engine to automatically spill their contents to backing-store memory. The cover instruction has additional side effects, explained below, in a subsequent subsection, that accrue under certain conditions obtainable only by privileged code. These side effects are useful for register stack management. The cover instruction is not a privileged instruction, and can be executed by non-privileged code. However, the useful side effects of the instruction do not occur when the cover instruction is executed by unprivileged code, limiting the direct usefulness of the cover instruction for register stack management by non-privileged code. Software-program developers have therefore recognized a need for a method to allow non-privileged code to obtain the full benefits of the cover instruction.